The present invention relates to the field of surgery and of medical observation, and more particularly relates to methods and devices for positioning a therapeutic or diagnostic tool as a function of three-dimensional images, that can be images carried out before hand (preoperation images) of a patient's organ.
In the present application, "tool" is to be construed as any therapeutic or diagnostic means carried out on a patient. The tool can be, for example, a device adequate to insert a screw in a patient's bone, a needle to carry out a puncture or simply to guide an optical fiber, a radiation transmission apparatus designed to act on a tumor, or a medical imaging device such as a gamma-scintigraphy camera, a positron emission tomography (PET) apparatus, or a magnetoencephalography (MEG) apparatus.
In other words, an object of the invention is to recover, during a surgical procedure, the morphological information that previous three-dimensional (3D) examinations have provided. This situation is very frequently encountered in the medical domain. Two examples of such a situation are given below.